The ESRC is the UK’s largest funding agency for research and postgraduate training relating to social and economic issues. The government agency invests more than £76m (€110m) in support of more than 2,000 researchers.

The ESRC required a Web-based solution to broaden and accelerate secure access and delivery of research to a wide variety of stakeholders across the world. The ESRC wanted to unlock access to information and make it readily accessible, easy to find and fast to publish.

The key to the success of the solution was based upon developing a clear understanding of the requirements of the ESRC and the different user groups, which ranged from academics to the general public. Many academics need a structured search to retrieve information via academic research protocols, whereas the majority of other users only need a simple, natural language search facility. 

ESRC selected Web specialists Amaze to provide a choice of best-of-breed applications and for their ability to understand and provide insight into the needs of these key stakeholder groups. An online Information Centre (Society Today) was created by Amaze as the first point of call for intelligent topic-based searches of social science in the UK. This operating solution and the public-facing portal provide an accessible Web interface connected to various academic data sources and linked to an intuitive SDL Tridion content management system. 

Another key element of the solution provided for ESRC is a business process outsourcing service. A team manages funding contract applications and the output of award holders who receive funding into social science research. The award holders range from individual post-graduates receiving thousands of pounds of funding, through to large public sector bodies receiving grants of millions of pounds to fund research. 

As part of the agreement, award holders have to showcase the research they output through a SDL Tridion output database, which improves the workflow and allows users to upload the output of their research. In many cases further tranches of funding are dependant on having research published and will only be released once the content is available. Librarians catalogue this information to a standard output on a central SDL Tridion content management system, which allows for effective document archive and search via Autonomy’s intelligent search engine, ensuring that all elements of the contracts are fulfilled. 

This is a five-year managed service deal that offers 24-hour technical support and a help desk to provide user support to both award holders and award seekers. The Information Centre is still being developed and will continue to evolve and improve.